An Improved Pairwise Exchange Heuristic for the Dynamic Plant Layout Problem 1 . 0

Much of the research in facility layout has focused on static layouts where the material handling flow is assumed to be constant during the planning horizon. But in today’s market-based, dynamic environment, layout rearrangement may be required during the planning horizon to maintain layout effectiveness. A few algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem. They include dynamic programming and pair-wise exchange. In this paper we propose an improved dynamic pair-wise exchange heuristic based on a previous method published in this journal. Tests show that the proposed method is effective and efficient.